Where to begin with Thomas Vinterberg

With an eclectic and international filmography that includes acclaimed art-house experiments, severe moral thrillers, lavish costume dramas and real-life stories, the work of Danish director Thomas Vinterberg can be difficult to pin down in terms of a consistent style. His latest film, Another Round, for instance, is a hilarious farce of male midlife crisis. As such, it’s apparently far removed from his last effort, the ambitious international production Kursk (2018), an epic and sombre historical drama about the doomed Russian nuclear submarine, or its predecessor, the small-scale but explosive melodrama The Commune (2016).

But while his films might be very different in terms of scale, subject and tone, Vinterberg has shown remarkable thematic consistency in his cinema. An inquisitiveness around a defined set of ideas and preoccupations has emerged across his work in diverse genres and filmmaking contexts. This makes immersing oneself in Vinterberg’s filmography that much more rewarding. Seeing his work in this light can help deepen your appreciation of each new film.

Vinterberg exploded on to the international film scene with the blackly comic family drama Festen. This 1998 film chronicles – in excruciatingly realistic detail – the breakdown of a lavish birthday party for an ageing, wealthy patriarch accused of horrendous crimes by his children. 

This was the first film made according to the tenets of Dogme 95, an austere and essentialist filmmaking movement that Vinterberg established with fellow Danes Lars von Trier, Kristian Levring and Søren Kragh-Jacobsen as a reaction against conventional and commercial narrative filmmaking. 

The film’s striking video aesthetic, use of natural lighting and direct sound, as well as the unnervingly authentic performances of the cast, remain as gutsy and economical now as anything in Vinterberg’s filmography. But apart from its formal rigour and punch, the film is also a terrific entry point into Vinterberg’s wider work. It vividly sets out his persistent cynicism towards family and intimate group dynamics, as well as his interest in social politics and taboo.

These themes have been explored in everything from the perverse, hyper secretive and ultimately malevolent family at the centre of his dystopian sci-fi It’s All about Love (2003), via the weird, quasi-familial cult of ‘Dandys’ in the Brechtian experiment Dear Wendy (2005), to the uneasy commune of 70s idealists who attempt to live together in a shared house in tempestuous drama The Commune.

In the latter film, a utopian idyll is disrupted by individual desires and sexual improprieties. The consistent thesis across these films appears to be that self-interest and desire will always disrupt the surface harmony of family units, traditional or created.

There’s something thrillingly metatextual, self-deprecating and humorous in this downbeat philosophy – particularly in the context of a collaborative activity such as filmmaking.

To varying extremes, Vinterberg has always dramatised a profound pessimism when it comes to the security, harmony or effective decision-making potential of traditional group units – from families and quasi-families on the small scale to the corridors of military power in Kursk or society at large in collapse in It’s All about Love.

In Another Round a group of friends, dissatisfied with their lives, elect to remain slightly drunk at all times, inspired by the supposed philosophy of Norwegian psychiatrist Finn Skårderud. A witty and authentic script draws bawdy humour and pathos from this faintly ridiculous premise, which is performed beautifully by a company of Vinterberg regulars including Mads Mikkelsen, Thomas Bo Larsen, Magnus Millang and Lars Ranthe.

The filmmaking style is loose, handheld and spontaneous, sharing something with Festen, The Commune and Dear Wendy in terms of visual style and certainly those films’ shrewdness of characterisation. But the real consistency in Another Round is the acute understanding of group dynamics, albeit played for laughs and in a spirit of comparative optimism.

None of these individual men, with their humdrum lives and petty dissatisfactions, initially appear liable to take their pact as far as they eventually do. But through goading and insecurity as well as brotherhood and shared intimacy, they push the situation to wild lengths, even as those around them appear to go out of their way to normalise, ignore or shamefully shrug off their behaviour. There’s a lightness of touch here, but these characters share a destructive delusion. 

Perhaps the most nakedly cynical and paranoid expression of this idea of group insanity is found in The Hunt (2012). Vinterberg’s mercilessly entertaining thriller is about a small-town primary school teacher (Mads Mikkelsen) wrongly accused of paedophilia. A simple misunderstanding escalates so quickly that pretty soon the central character is in fear for his life as well as the loss of his family, career and livelihood.

It’s a biting dissection of group dynamics on a large scale, as the town – initially framed as cosy, idyllic and harmonious – fully turns against one of their own at the slightest suggestion of indiscretion. The film’s ambiguous ending leaves the question of reconciliation tantalisingly unresolved.

Films like Festen, The Hunt and Another Round are pleasurable for their formal precision, the clarity of their ideas and their rigour. By contrast, Vinterberg’s larger scale projects – from the muddled and puzzling It’s All about Love, via his rather workmanlike costume film Far from the Madding Crowd (2015), to the occasionally bloated Kursk – remain interesting precisely because they are messy expressions of the same ideas. At their best, they provide rather awkward frameworks for Vinterberg’s continued exploration of group dynamics and conflict.

Kursk, in particular, with its visually ravishing palette and awesome scale, tries to imbue the procedural drama of the disaster and the social lives of the doomed sailors with a level of sincerity and direct emotion that feels rather outside Vinterberg’s comfort zone. The best scenes in the film unfold in the power bases above ground, where red tape, institutional incompetence and infighting play out as dark comedy.

Likewise, the constraints of literary adaptation and the costume film feel rather an uneasy fit for the director in Far from the Madding Crowd. The most effective scenes dramatise large-scale social gatherings, social mores and class conflict, rather than the convoluted romance at the centre of Thomas Hardy’s story.